Name the job.
Seven shapes of work, in the words you would search for. All of them share one spine: deterministic where it counts, auditable always, models kept where they earn their place.
LLM integration
The model earns a seat, not the keys. Wired into your stack with a schema at every exit, a failure path for every call, and no route to a number anybody signs.
CLAUDE & GPT APIS · SCHEMA-LOCKED OUTPUTS · CIRCUIT BREAKERS · COST BUDGETS
RAG pipelines that stay true
Retrieval is easy to build once and hard to keep honest. Ingestion that tracks its sources, versioned indexes, every rebuild evaluated before promotion — rollback is a pointer change.
VECTOR SEARCH · EMBEDDINGS · FRESHNESS MONITORING · EVAL SETS
AI agents with boundaries
An agent that escalates is useful. An agent that guesses is a liability. Multi-step workflows where every consequential action is validated in code or lands on a human.
AGENT WORKFLOWS · TOOL DESIGN · HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP · ESCALATION PATHS
Document extraction at scale
Real documents are photographs of paper: rotated, stamped, bilingual, Arabic beside Latin. Typed records where every field traces to a region on a page — cheapest method first, models last.
OCR + LAYOUT · MIXED SCRIPTS (AR/LAT) · RECONCILIATION · ZERO-TOKEN FAST PATHS
EU AI Act & audit readiness
The 2026 Omnibus moved the high-risk deadlines to 2027/28 — and a system on the market before its date largely stays out of that regime. Shipping early is the strategy, and what auditors want is what I build anyway: traceability, human oversight, and a boundary you can show them.
AUDIT TRAILS · REPLAY · RISK DOCUMENTATION · AI GOVERNANCE
Rescue work
Already shipped an agent that scares you? I find every path where a model can touch a number, cut it, and make the architecture hold the line — without a rewrite.
BOUNDARY RETROFITS · EVAL HARNESSES · INCIDENT-DRIVEN HARDENING
Evals that gate releases
A model feature without an eval harness is a demo. Golden sets with expected values derived before the code exists, recorded-response replays that pin the deterministic part of an LLM path, defect reproductions that fail the build the day they silently heal — and failure floors that only move up.
GOLDEN SETS · LLM REPLAY REGRESSION · STRICT-XFAIL REPRODUCTIONS · ZERO-FAILURE FLOORS
IF YOUR JOB ISN’T ON THE LIST BUT SOUNDS LIKE THESE, WRITE ANYWAY. THE FILTER IS THE SPINE, NOT THE LABEL.